This one change in Fear Street: Prom Queen would have made the film as good as the original trilogy

Fear Street: Prom Queen debuted on Netflix on May 23, 2025, nearly four years after the first trilogy arrived on the streamer. However, unlike before, the reviews have been disappointing, which has impacted its Rotten Tomatoes score. It currently stands at 26%, as opposed to the fresh score for the trilogy. So, it's clear that something is amiss in this new stand-alone chapter as compared to the three films.

The common thread between the trilogy installments was the co-writer and director, Leigh Janiak, who had been working on these chapters since before they became Netflix originals. For logistical reasons, they had to be released online as opposed to in theaters. However, that allowed her to establish some connections between all these chapters, and much like the R. L. Stine novels it is based on, they ended on cliffhangers. So, people were hooked to the screen to learn more and more about the unresolved mysteries.

Fear Street: Prom Queen does not end on a cliffhanger note, and it doesn't focus enough on the supernatural aspects of the stories. It also presents an uninteresting slasher villain as opposed to the trilogy. These reasons, among a few others, kept it away from being as good as Leigh Janiak's trilogy for Netflix.

Disclaimer: This article contains spoilers for Fear Street: Prom Queen. Reader discretion is advised.

Fear Street: Prom Queen seems uninterested in its own characters, and that leaves room for improvement.

There are many things that Fear Street: Prom Queen could have done better, but probably the most important has to do with its characters. The 2025 film follows Lori (India Fowler), standing up against the school's mean girl, Tifanny (Finna Strazza), for the prom queen race. For Lori, it is more than just winning a title. It is also about clearing the blot on her family name because of an incident on her mother's night.

Lori's mother was accused of killing her prom date, and even after she was proven innocent, the incident left a stain on her reputation. So, Lori sees the win as a win for her family. With these details, the film had plenty of chances to develop these characters with more depth and complexity. However, it only shares that information through some dialogues without digging further into what and how it happened.

That wasn't the case with Leigh Janiak's Fear Street trilogy, which had another subtextual layer to its slasher storyline. In a July 2021 interview with RogerEbert.com, Janiak spoke about the themes of systemic oppression she explored through her work:

"One of the reasons I love horror movies is because of exactly what you’re talking about, which is that you can make these really fun, violent, crazy things, but also make them about something. So, that was our thing. It was about systemic oppression. It was about systemic rot. It was about what it means to be told by society that you’re “the other” and that you’re an outsider."

Janiak further mentioned how these themes fit into the world of Shadyside:

"That was the world of Shadyside: just full of people that had been marginalized for their sexuality, for their race, for their socioeconomic status, for just being different. We’re telling the story of characters that usually would be dead very quickly [in horror movies]."

Besides that, Fear Street: Prom Queen also had a forgettable slasher villain as compared to the original trilogy. The latest film showed Tifanny's parents as the killers on the loose instead of offering a supernatural connection to their past.

In the mid-credits scene, Fear Street: Prom Queen introduces the Witch's Mark formed by Nancy's blood, but it doesn't acknowledge this supernatural aspect in the rest of the script, which makes its presence seem rather futile.